Top Three
White House Eyes Next Phase of Pandemic: Via Politico
"Emboldened by falling case counts, the Biden administration is plotting a new phase of the pandemic response aimed at containing the coronavirus and conditioning Americans to live with it."
"The White House is wary of declaring victory too early, only to get hit with another catastrophic variant, a half-dozen administration officials and others close to the Covid response said."
"Officials are also anxious that voters will be disappointed by the idea of living with an endemic virus under a president who once pledged to shut it down completely."
"And as to what metrics will signal success against the virus, officials said they’re still figuring that out — and hope they’ll know it when they see it."
“It’s something we need to answer,” the senior administration official said. “If you talk to six doctors inside and outside the administration, you get six different answers.”
"And while the administration has enough supplies for the current crisis, three people with knowledge of the matter said the Omicron response has largely depleted the government’s Covid funding. Some officials working on the Covid response warn the administration needs vast stockpiles of vaccines, treatments and tests to ensure it’s not caught off guard by yet another variant."
Did Public Education Have It Coming?: Asks Checker Finn
"The inertia is profound. And yet, in many ways, the educational failures of the past several years were far worse than they needed to be because of long-standing characteristics of American public education. It’s worth recounting three of those."
"The tendency to place employees’ interests first...As David Leonhardt wrote in the New York Times in early January, “For the past two years...many communities in the U.S. have...tried to minimize the spread of Covid...rather than minimizing the damage that Covid does to society. They have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults, often without acknowledging the dilemma or assessing which decisions lead to less overall harm.”
"The disempowering of parents. ... Some parents have been very cautious and want remote schooling or lots of quarantines or masks. Others are the opposite. But school systems, especially the big ones, haven’t been able to figure out a way to allow parents to choose schools (and hybrids and pods and other delivery arrangements) that meet their comfort levels."
"The failure to innovate, including sluggish, clumsy deployment of the same technologies that have revolutionized the rest of our lives.... Education could have been 24/7 long before Covid-19 hit, available whenever and wherever one wanted to connect; it could have been year-round; it could have been move-at-your-own-speed and mastery-based; it could have diversified, flexible staffing arrangements; it could have “just in time” curricular units; it could have been so different. Just imagine how it might have developed if Google, Tesla, Amazon, or Apple were in charge instead of big, sluggish public-sector bureaucracies. Then imagine how much less painful would have been the plague-driven adaptations."
What Actually Changed for Little Kids' Vaccines?: Asks Katherine Wu in The Atlantic.
"This pivot is, at first glance, bizarre. Six weeks ago, right before Christmas, Pfizer announced that late-stage trials of two mini shots had produced somewhat lackluster antibody results in 2-to-4-year-olds, and a third dose could be necessary to clinch protection."
"Nothing about the vaccine itself has changed since then; no new data (actually, no data at all) have been publicized."
"Pfizer still says that a third dose will probably be necessary, and may report results on the effects of that dose around early spring. And yet, the stance on the shots for this group of kids has shifted substantially. Somehow, we’ve gone in an instant from two doses aren’t enough to actually, they kind of are. And both statements, somehow, are meant to be true at once."
"All of this adds up to some tough decisions for the FDA’s advisory panel. If Pfizer’s vaccine-performance data were unilaterally marvelous, we would have heard by now, but they’re also unlikely to be unilaterally abysmal. Data that sit between those two extremes do not make for a slam dunk. And compared with most other age groups, very young kids remain at relatively low risk of having a severe case of COVID-19, making a super-thorough risk-benefit analysis for infant-and-toddler vaccination especially important."
Federal
Local Government ARPA Investment Tracker: A joint project of Brookings Metro, the National Association of Counties (NACo) and the National League of Cities (NLC). More information.
"Compiles information from local governments to offer a detailed picture of how large cities and counties (with populations of at least 250,000) are deploying the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund dollars.”
COVID-19 Research
Results from Human Trial Study: Via Science, "Researchers in the United Kingdom yesterday posted the results of a first-of-its-kind study in which healthy young volunteers were purposely infected with an early strain of the pandemic coronavirus."
"As hoped, none of the participants got seriously ill, and scientists were able to closely track their symptoms and gain unique insight into how both SARS-CoV-2 levels and symptoms vary from start to finish during an infection."
"The success of this initial “human challenge” study provides a strategy for testing COVID-19 treatments, vaccines, and viral variants going forward, the researchers say."
"The results also painted a clear time course of viral travel in the body. An average of 2 days after the nose drops were delivered, symptoms began and virus was shed in the throat. Symptoms peaked at about 5 days. That’s also when active virus levels peaked in the nose, where the viral load was much larger than in the throat. Infectious virus stopped being isolated from volunteers’ noses an average of 10 days after infection."
"Even if people had no symptoms at all … they all generated extremely large amounts of virus, which really speaks to the infectivity [of the virus] and explains how the pandemic has spread so rapidly,” says Chris Chiu, an immunologist at Imperial College London (ICL)"
Prevalence and Durability of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies Among Unvaccinated US Adults by History of COVID-19: Study on natural immunity published in JAMA:
"Although evidence of natural immunity in unvaccinated healthy US adults up to 20 months after confirmed COVID-19 infection is encouraging, it is unclear how these antibody levels correlate with protection against future SARS-CoV-2 infections, particularly with emerging variants."
SARS-CoV-2 Variant Tracking and Mitigation During In-Person Learning at a Midwestern University: Study:
"Mass vaccination efforts were associated with a statistically significant decrease in the spread of SARS-CoV-2 even as highly transmissible variants were introduced in a residential campus setting."
Hospitals Can’t Accept This as ‘Normal’: Ed Yong
"At the height of the recent Omicron surge, Advocate Trinity Hospital, in Chicago, was inundated with patients who spent more than 40 hours in the waiting room, holding tight for a bed in the emergency room, which was itself heaving with people who were waiting for a spot in the intensive-care unit, which was also full."
"To see as many patients as quickly as possible, the hospital’s exhausted staff brought intensive care into the emergency room, using portable oxygen tanks sourced from a local company. They brought emergency services into the waiting room, installing catheters and ordering medical tests for people who couldn’t yet be given a bed. They resuscitated a patient who had had a heart attack while still in an ambulance, because there wasn’t anywhere for them to be off-loaded."
"During one recent shift when just four nurses were on duty, three of whom had been hired from an agency and were on their first day, a COVID patient went into cardiac arrest in the waiting room, where they had been sitting for 10 hours."
"The staffing problems aren’t about just missing bodies, but also missing experience. As the oldest nurses resigned, their deep well of knowledge left too. Newly graduated nurses take twice as long to be onboarded as before the pandemic, Gwendolyn Oglesby-Odom, the chief nursing officer, told me, because the pandemic disrupted their training and left them with less clinical experience."
"With COVID set to be a permanent fixture in our lives, more surges and variants are possible. The hospital will have to deal with people whose care was postponed amid the surge and those with long-term problems because of their run-ins with COVID. Meanwhile, the staffing shortages that long preceded Omicron’s arrival will remain."
With Vaccines Available, Mask Mandates Are Not Necessary In School: Argues Scott Balsitis, Lucy McBride, Kristen Walsh and Carol Vidal in USA Today.
COVID Deaths Rise As Omicron Wanes: Via Axios
State
Georgia: 40% of metro Atlanta schools’ COVID cases were in January.
Illinois: School districts call for ‘off ramp’ from masking and quarantines, with a ‘measured return to normalcy’
Iowa: “Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) will soon end the public health disaster proclamation that Iowa has operated under since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic nearly two years ago,” the Des Moines Register reports.
North Carolina: A North Carolina state health panel declined to require high school seniors to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, a decision that aligns with the wishes of Gov. Roy Cooper and other state health leaders who’ve said such a mandate was premature.
South Carolina: Gov. McMaster issued an executive order in January requesting a review of the mental health services programs available at South Carolina’s public schools.
Utah: Gov. Cox signs bill giving Utah legislative leaders control over individual school closings for COVID
"Under the new procedure, a school that reaches the state’s threshold for an outbreak will first have to appeal to the district’s local school board, asking that students be allowed to learn remotely."
"The school board will then need to hold a public meeting to vote on whether to take that action. If the members vote in favor, they’ll next have to ask for permission from the state."
"Approval to go online will require signoff from all four of the top-ranking leaders in Utah: the governor, the speaker of the House, the president of the Senate and the state superintendent. It’s unclear how quickly those leaders can or will respond to a request, but their decision will have to be unanimous."
International
Germany: Germany's expert vaccine commission, the Standing Committee on Vaccination (StiKo), issued a recommendation for approval of the Novavax vaccine for adults.
UK: Health regulators approve the Novavax vaccine.
Economic Recovery
Consumers Are Pivoting Spending to Services Like Dining and Travel: Via the WSJ
"Goods—including nondurable goods such as food and clothing, and durable goods such as cars and appliances—averaged 31% of total personal consumption in the two years before the pandemic."
"That soared to 36% in March and April 2021, shortly before Covid-19 vaccines became widely available. The share has been dropping since, to 34% in December."
"James Knightley, chief international economist at ING, said consumers are starting this year with “a combination of general fatigue of buying physical things and Omicron reducing the ability to spend on services.”
Americans Offer Gloomy State of the Nation Report: Via Gallup
"The Great Reorganization": Via Axios, "Millions of Americans want to quit their jobs, but many would happily stay at their companies in different positions."
"1 in 3 candidates who sought out a new job in the past year searched internally within their organization first, according to a new report from the consulting firm Gartner."
"As workers in the era of COVID, “we’re more open to re-examination,” says Shonna Waters, a vice president at the career coaching company BetterUp."
Long COVID Adds To Labor Shortage: Via Axios:
1.6 million workers could be missing from the labor market because of long COVID, accounting for 15%+ of unfilled jobs, estimates Katie Bach, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Resources
Schools Got $190 Billion in COVID Relief From the Feds. What’s Happened To It?: Via Chalkbeat
"Most, though, haven’t produced any statewide data — at least none that Chalkbeat could find after reviewing all 50 state education department websites. Spending for private schools appears even harder to track since they aren’t required to post public plans."
"The private company Burbio has combed through over 2,000 district plans for spending the most recent pot of federal money, and then attempted to categorize them in standardized ways. Using that data, Georgetown-based think tank FutureEd found the most common items included summer learning, after-school programming, HVAC upgrades, more teachers and counselors, personal protective equipment, new technology and devices, professional development, and tutoring."
Communities in Schools: Announced a "transformative" $133.5 million gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott.
NEA Survey: "Massive staff shortages in schools leading to educator burnout; alarming number of educators indicating they plan to leave profession." Details here.
AASA Awards Mini-Grants To School Districts Across The Nation: More than $80,000 in funds have been distributed to 23 school districts across the country and have been used for everything from urgent everyday necessities to disaster relief.
Campaign Ad: That gives us a sense of what we might see this cycle. Spot from N2 America at winning over covid-weary parents. Airing in CO, MN, MI and, DC.
America’s Democracy Can’t Afford for Our Public School Experiment to Fail: Via the Bush Institute's Anne Wicks.
"Education Twitter timelines are riddled with righteous absolutisms and disdainful incredulity at opposing perspectives."
"Anyone who claims, with certitude, that they have all the answers should be ignored. The leaders we should listen to consistently do two things. First, they show their work, explaining the why and how behind their conclusions. Second, they show a willingness to adapt when better information comes to light. We expect this kind of thinking from students. Why should we exempt our leaders from the same?
How's the Baby? A graphic artist in Germany works from home. His wife goes off to work, so he looks after their baby girl. In response to her frequent texts to see how he's doing with the baby, he sends humorous responses back.